The consumer electronics market is exploding. The continued miniaturization of electronic components, enhanced processing power of chips, and reduced manufacturing costs has contributed to the proliferation of consumer electronic devices capable of processing digital media such as audio, video, images, animation, presentations, and other content. Media devices include for example, cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players, video players, camcorders, game players, digital cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs), personal computers, stereos, etc. Many media devices are able to store large amounts of digital content, connect to the Internet, and in some instances wirelessly exchange data over short ranges with other electronic devices. The proliferation of devices capable of playing and recording digital media has resulted in large volumes of content within the household and workplace that is distributed across devices.
However, web-based storage services offered by various service providers as well as current network storage devices present a variety of drawbacks. One primary hurdle to the use of such solutions is that they limit the user to accessing stored content through a web browser or proprietary application as they were primarily designed for use with personal computers. Such solutions generally require the user to access their stored content through an intermediary server. Direct access to a personal storage device is possible by using a static Internet Protocol (IP) address or mapped domain name, but such options are generally difficult to configure, are time consuming, and result in additional fees for the user.
Addressing in telecommunication systems is broken down into three main groups: (1) Subscriber addressing: this addressing is used for keeping track of the mobility of users and making sure that a user can be contacted for any incoming call or message; (2) Network element addressing: this addressing is used for infrastructure node addressing and is mainly used by the network management; (3) Routing addressing: Network elements maintain a graph of connected nodes which allows them to keep information about their neighbouring environment, in order to be able to support call handover when subscribers move through their networks. These telecommunication addressing schemes take the position of treating the user as a subscriber identity module (SIM) and the infrastructure as two completely separate entities and do not enable addressing based on correlations between these two entities.
FIG. 1 shows how routing of a request from a subscriber 102 (or User Equipment—UE) to a content stored in a device 104 in friend's home 106 works in today's setting. The conceptual path from A's UE 102 to B's home 106 is labeled with 108. The real routing path of the request is labeled with 110. This real path will go through the access network 112, then through the packet core network 114 out on the Internet 116, where the IP address or DNS address of B's home 106 is used for reaching the edge node 104.